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WP4 - Environmental Adaptation in Plant-like Swarms
Environmental Adaptation is the next level of adaptation. Rather than simply exhibiting advanced damage repair, plants are indeed highly adaptive, because their patterning, initially laid
down during embryogenesis, keeps on progressing and a can change dramatically during adult stages, in accordance to environmental conditions (such as nutrient resources, temperature,
light etc). The agents – the individual cells – are capable of unleashing different developmental programmes, even within differentiated tissue, causing, through multicellular interactions,
changes in the type, number and distribution of organs within the organism. Moreover, these developmental programmes are performed in such a way as to optimize the fitness of the plant as a
whole, implying that local decisions regarding, for example, primordia formation are somehow integrated over the whole organism, being able to impact any consecutive local decision. Inspired by these challenges plants are facing, we here identify key concepts that we will explore within the underlying standard model as well as with more specific implementations.
